You may now close your eyes and start paying attention to your breathing and only to your breathing. Take, long, slow, deep breaths in through your nose and then hold them for a few seconds, but not so long that you have to strain or feel uncomfortable and then slowly exhale through your mouth.
Continue to repeat this so that you fall into a rhythm with your breathing. Push out all other thoughts and focus only on your breathing, in and out, slowly and deeply.
Always inhale through your nose and always exhale through your mouth. Your focus should be on your breathing, on every inhale and exhale.
For ten times, you do this, focus only on your breathing and nothing else. On your eleventh breath, pay attention to your neck and head, feeling how relaxed the muscles of your face, head, and neck are making sure to keep your breathing rhythm exactly the same as you have been; slow and steady.
Take note of each muscle group that is relaxed, and by focusing on them while you breathe, you will feel them relax even more.
Now, while continuing to breath, focus on how relaxed your shoulders and upper back muscles are, then your upper arms, then your lower arms, your wrists, your hands and your fingers.
As you mentally go over how relaxed these muscle groups are, feel any remaining tension melt out of your muscles with each exhale.
Now, bring your focus back to your lower back, on how relaxed your lower back is, your hips, your thighs, your upper legs, then your lower legs, ankles, feet and toes; continuing to breathe slowly and deeply. Continue to breath and focus on the tension leaving your body until you are fully relaxed and your mind is free.
Images
Now, you should be fully relaxed and your mind should be clear. Continue to breathe slowly and deeply but instead of focusing on your muscles relaxing, focus on the back of your closed eyelids. Do not open your eyes but focus on looking out into the darkness, straight in front of you, with your eyes closed.
You will notice that you start to see things, flashes of light or brief images. You might see starbursts of color or colored lines. Your only role is to watch.
Do not try to force an image to come and do not try to change what you see. Do not try to make images stay, you are only watching. You might feel like your eyes are unfocused behind your closed eyelids and that is good.
These images are actually hypnotic, and they should bring your focus to them, and to nothing else. If you are having trouble focusing on them, you need to go back to your relaxation and try again.
The more you pay attention to the hypnogogic images, the more you will be detached from the outside world, you might even start to feel like you are floating, and that is fine.
Allow that sensation to help lull you deeper into the trancelike state that you are in. Stay immobile in your bed, you can imagine that your bed is a cloud, holding you in comfortably and softly, so you can continue to feel like you are floating while seeing these images appear and disappear under your eyelids.
Whenever you feel the desire to try to hold onto any thoughts other than the images, acknowledge the thought and let it flow away from you and once again, focus on the images that you are seeing.
Watch them appear and reappear and do not be concerned when an image fades away from your sight. The images will be sporadic at first, but the longer they continue, the better you will be able to see them, the more complex they will become. Lines become patterns and images and muted colors become bright colors.
Dreaming
The complex patterns will start to resemble familiar things and images. Instead of abstract, you will find that you are seeing something that looks like scene from a movie, something real. You will now have entered the dream state.
When the patterns start to form solid imagery, let yourself flow into it, willingly. Do not be startled that your patterns have turned into an image, or you can end up waking yourself up and will need to start over. Watch the scene and image build up around you, continuing to do nothing but observe while your dream builds into a solid dream image.
As things start to build up, remind yourself that you are dreaming and continue to watch without taking part in the building of the dream.
Enjoy watching the scene build up around you. Listen for the sounds or smells that come with the dream. It might start off looking like a drawn scene but will turn into 3-D as it builds so you find yourself going from just watching the scene develop from a distance to being in the scene while it builds up around you.
At this point, you can help to use your imagination to help create the scene more vividly, engaging all of your senses into it.
It is tempting to want to start to interact and manipulate your dream world the minute that the images form, but trying to do so, when you are a beginner, will pull you out of it instead.
Continue to be a passive observer while the dream builds up around you. Only once you are able to easily do this should you try to interact. A good way to ensure that you are solidly in the dream state is to do your dream action, such as trying to fly to see if you have been successful.